6 popular music of the civil war era

Listening Examples

22. Stephen Foster: “I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”

23. Stephen Foster: “Oh! Susanna”

24. John Stafford Smith: “The Anacreontic Song” (“Anacreon in Heaven”)

25. Anonymous: “Get Off the Track”

Suggestions for Further Listening

Civil War Music

Performances by the Americus Brass Band

Terms to Review

fret

bones

walkaround

glee

concert band

Key Figures

Daniel Decatur Emmett

Virginia Minstrels

Christy Minstrels

James A. Bland

Stephen Foster

Francis Scott Key

The Hutchinson Family

Patrick S. Gilmore

Visuals

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Banjo Lesson

Scene from a minstrel show

Julia Ward Howe

A concert band, circa 1875

Critical Thinking

Discuss some of the reasons minstrelsy became so popular just at the time of rising tensions between North and South and between whites and blacks. Which does it reflect more: white people’s contempt for, or fascination with, black culture?

What might be some of the reasons that blacks performed—in blackface—on the minstrel stage after the Civil War?

Do you recognize any echoes of the minstrel tradition in contemporary American culture? In his book Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop, W. T. Lhamon Jr. suggests (in a picture on the book jacket) a relationship between a minstrel performer dancing in the 1840s and M. C. Hammer performing in the 1990 hip-hop video “Hammer Time.” Can you support or refute Lhamon’s suggestion?

Would you choose “The Star Spangled Banner” or another patriotic song as America’s national anthem? If another, which one, and why?

A young divinity student named Samuel Francis Smith set the words to one candidate for the American national anthem, “America,” to a German tune, “Heil Dir im Siegerkranz,” also used as the Prussian national song and the British royal anthem as well. (There had been Dutch, Danish, French, Swiss, and Austrian versions, too.) Oliver Wendell Holmes (a close friend of the poet) suggested that had the poet written “Our country” instead of “My country, ‘tis of thee” the hymn would not have been “immortal.” Do you agree or disagree that the choice of “My” instead of “Our” was a “master stroke”?

1. Compare the differences we perceive between popular, concert, and religious music today with the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans considered music.